Jul 2017
XIII-II. Death: The Sound and the Fury
I remember vividly losing the faith of my grandmother, I was standing holy as you like over my great grandmothers grave as they returned her to the Kentucky dirt that raised her, and my grandmother, one wrinkled hand clutching mine as if I were the reaper himself, the other wrapped so tightly around a bible I didn't know whose skin might split open first, hers or gods, and then I walked to the edge of the world and looked down, into a canopy of tree tops so dense no light could break through, so strong and so intertwined that neither man nor machine could pierce within, and when it began to rain there I lifted my scarred veins to heaven and I begged for absolution, I begged to be washed clean of sin and diagnosis and become pure, later, when my best friend plunged a needle into his veins for the first time I couldn't watch, I looked instead to that same Kentucky sky, I thought about how maybe God goes by a different name to everybody, I thought about how that sky must have looked to my grandfather as he charged across this land with horse and pistol and saber, and if he thought God meant freedom or a new empire of chains, when I look around here I think about all those people marching towards death all thinking they might be the one, the one to conquer time and become greater than, to live out eternity as the archetypal hero, the one who brings sunrise to an endless night and lifts the world up off its knees, I think about what the air must feel like to them as they die, thin and sharp and nostalgic, with the hint of a promise broken the last taste on their lips, and I want to visit each of their graves and ask them if it was worth it, if they had won or lost or if victory was an illusion made for fools and politicians, men of sound and fury, signifying nothing, and by the time I at last turn back towards my friend and open my mouth to tell him this, he is already gone, he is gone now and the land desolate - the sky holds no more hope than the soil here, and so I wonder when he started digging the grave they put him in, and I wonder too if I've begun digging yet, where they will lay me to rest, and when, but here I am with no one to ask so I wonder, I go on and I wonder
I remember vividly losing the faith of my grandmother, I was standing holy as you like over my great grandmothers grave as they returned her to the Kentucky dirt that raised her, and my grandmother, one wrinkled hand clutching mine as if I were the reaper himself, the other wrapped so tightly around a bible I didn't know whose skin might split open first, hers or gods, and then I walked to the edge of the world and looked down, into a canopy of tree tops so dense no light could break through, so strong and so intertwined that neither man nor machine could pierce within, and when it began to rain there I lifted my scarred veins to heaven and I begged for absolution, I begged to be washed clean of sin and diagnosis and become pure, later, when my best friend plunged a needle into his veins for the first time I couldn't watch, I looked instead to that same Kentucky sky, I thought about how maybe God goes by a different name to everybody, I thought about how that sky must have looked to my grandfather as he charged across this land with horse and pistol and saber, and if he thought God meant freedom or a new empire of chains, when I look around here I think about all those people marching towards death all thinking they might be the one, the one to conquer time and become greater than, to live out eternity as the archetypal hero, the one who brings sunrise to an endless night and lifts the world up off its knees, I think about what the air must feel like to them as they die, thin and sharp and nostalgic, with the hint of a promise broken the last taste on their lips, and I want to visit each of their graves and ask them if it was worth it, if they had won or lost or if victory was an illusion made for fools and politicians, men of sound and fury, signifying nothing, and by the time I at last turn back towards my friend and open my mouth to tell him this, he is already gone, he is gone now and the land desolate - the sky holds no more hope than the soil here, and so I wonder when he started digging the grave they put him in, and I wonder too if I've begun digging yet, where they will lay me to rest, and when, but here I am with no one to ask so I wonder, I go on and I wonder
